Posts Tagged ‘Grove City College’

It’s difficult to find a newspaper that has demonstrated a worse pro-Obama and anti-Bush bias than The New York Times, especially when dealing with the War on Terror.

And so I expected a headline like this in the Times. When I searched Google looking for a text of President Obama’s statement on the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Times headline was the first thing that popped up.

That’s what I immediately thought when I heard the stunning statement by President Obama announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden. To wit, President Obama stated:

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden.The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens . Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done .

Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

For President Obama, it was a refreshing and surprising expression of American exceptionalism.

More than that, his words read like a punctuation, an exclamation point, on what President George W. Bush had said on September 14, 2001, during an unforgettable 9/11 memorial service at the National Cathedral.

Bush himself had organized the service. He picked the music, selected speakers, and carefully chose the words he delivered that afternoon.

Bush had declared the day a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. In preparing for his speech, he literally prayed that he could rise to the occasion and deliver his talk meaningfully in keeping with the somberness of the occasion.

“I prayed a lot before the speech,” he later told reporter Bill Sammon, “because I felt like it was a moment where I needed, well, frankly, for the good Lord to shine through.”

Everyone in elite Washington was there: Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford sat in the third pew, as did Al Gore. The Clinton family sat in the front pew. An ailing Billy Graham, in a poignant display, struggled to address those gathered. President Bush approached the platform at 1 p.m. He stated:

We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation’s sorrow. We come before God to pray for the missing and the dead and for those who love them.On Tuesday our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and ashes and bent steel. Now come the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning to read .

Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.

War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.

Note that last word, “choosing.” Indeed, here is where both President Bush and President Obama – not to mention America and history – found common ground: This war, and that awful attack on September 11, 2001, crafted by the diabolical Osama bin Laden, had not been our choice. Both Bush and Obama pledged that justice against Osama would come at a time of our choosing.

Former president Jimmy Carter told NBC News last week that his work at home and abroad has been “superior” to other presidents.

“I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” Carter assessed. “Primarily because of [my] activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center and in international affairs, and, to some degree, domestic affairs.”

In response to this boastful claim, we’ll hear the usual defenses: Carter misspoke. Carter is a good man. Carter has good intentions. I catch myself saying these things.

But even if well-intentioned, we shouldn’t avoid frank appraisals of Carter’s role.

In truth, and especially when it relates to foreign policy, Carter has done far worse than good. More, his failures have resulted from a remarkably strange trust in some awful dictators. Carter’s infamous naïveté has been destructive, long producing inferior results, not superior ones.

Carter has been so unique in this regard, and worse than other presidents, Democrat and Republican, that, in my latest book, Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, we placed him on the cover as a symbol of duped Americans during the Cold War; specifically, the June 1979 photo of a smiling Carter kissing Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev. Carter did this as the Soviets were rapidly picking up more satellites worldwide than any time since the 1940s, and mere months before they invaded Afghanistan.

Sure, but Carter, in his NBC interview, was talking about his work as a former president, right? Yes, but that record isn’t much better.

If you think Carter was misled by Brezhnev, consider his statements in recent decades regarding Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro, Yasir Arafat, Hamas, Iraq, Iran, and on and on. They take your breath away. I can’t list them all, but one case stands out – namely, Carter’s visit to the world’s most repressive state: Kim’s North Korea.

Carter made a June 1994 trip to this prison state, where he was manipulated on a grand scale. Other Westerners have made that trip and were subject to manipulation. The difference, however, is few took the bait, and none like Carter. Worse, Carter magnified the manipulation in reports at press conferences, in interviews, and in a piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

For starters, Carter dispelled speculation that Kim was dying. He found the aging despot “vigorous, alert, intelligent.” Kim died mere days after Carter’s visit.

Carter questioned the consensus that Kim was even a despot, telling Americans he observed a Kim engaged in “very free discussions with his ministers.” I’m sure that’s precisely what he saw.

Kim’s handlers marched Carter through their Potemkin village. Carter was totally hoodwinked, filing this incredible account of life in North Korea:

People are busy. They work 48 hours a week . We found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. The only difference is that during working hours there are very few people on the street. They all have jobs or go to school. And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It’s like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that.

In truth, North Korea is a sea of darkness. The country at night is draped in black – that is, when the lights are not ablaze to fool high-profile visitors like President Carter – in empty contrast to South Korea, which is awash in the glow of freedom.

Within one year of Carter’s gushing appraisal, two to three million North Koreans (out of a population of 20 million) starved to death. They weren’t packing Wal-Mart; they were eating grass, bark from trees, and, in some cases, human corpses.

Recall, too, the nuclear agreement Carter brokered while there, and not exactly with the enthusiastic go-ahead of the Clinton administration. Carter stood outside the Clinton White House and triumphantly assured us that “the [nuclear] crisis is over” – words headlined by The New York Times and Washington Post. A few years later, North Korea announced it was a nuclear state, in direct violation of the “Agreed Framework.”